What is Social Listening?

The idea of Social Listening to customers and potential customers is nothing new and as a result, social listening is now important business.

Businesses are listening because they want to engage directly with customers to drive insights and make fruitful decisions.  Social Listening is a course of action of finding Insights into social media conversations.

It gathers social media posts that are relevant to a brand, campaign or topics and analyses the stored information to find insights and trends. Social listening can be done through different online tools.

Social listening has become one of the most effective ways for researchers to understand how people perceive brands and trends. Social listening delivers a wealth of Insights.

Social media analytics can bring a host of powerful insights for developing a better-targeted and efficient content marketing strategy. Social media plays a significant role in brand communication.

Brands had not very close relationships with customers or any real-time conversations from every corner of the world before the arrival of Facebook or Twitter.

Knowing your audience is important when you’re developing content and social listening is a better way to grab customers.

Social listening can discover Insights such as:-

• What are the different opinions that social media users have about your brand?
• Who is talking about your brand, product, industry or topic of interest?
• What social media platform does your target market use the most?
• What topics do your competitors chat about?

The social listening process will involve: First, monitor social media channels for posts which include specific keywords or topics, and Second, analyze all posts to reveal the common themes and the expected conclusions.

Social listening is typically used by marketers in the following terms:-

• To keep social media marketing strategies on course and delivering results
• To increase brand awareness and improve brand sentiment
• To build useful and informative content for your customers
• To get new ideas and develop new marketing or Ad campaign
• To track the competitor’s efforts to weaken your brand and identify competitive advantage
• Brand’s Online Reputation Management (ORM)
• Crisis or Issue management
• Innovation and product management
• Influencer Identification

Benefits of Social Listening –

Social listening is what your customers and perspectives have to say. You can use your customers’ words to better inform your product and marketing strategy team.

You can use the conversations happening over social media networks to support your business goals. You should start to listen to the global conversation because social listening has multiple benefits as:-

# Low-Cost Operation – Social media platform’s cost is significantly cheaper to handle customer care as customers increasingly reach out there. Twitter social media platform’s cost customer service is less than a traditional phone call or email correspondence.

# Access to Analytics – Marketers can develop marketing content by leveraging topic insights and will be able to create optimized content.

Marketers with social media gain can get a wide range of insights that help to discover what/who/how/where is going on or being said about a brand.

Marketers can build up a map of influences and will focus on specific groups of interested users.

# Attract Customers – It’ll become easier to find new customers once you start listening to social conversations.

Social listening helps marketers do more than observe. It gives the ability to engage in and own the conversations happening around their brands.

Social listening is helpful when trying to focus on real conversations as the right tools can help to brand improvement.

Smart marketers use social listening to discover keywords and hashtags that are relevant to customers.

The markets who engage in social listening find the practice useful when it comes to developing the short-tail and long-tail keyword strategies.

A focus on keywords and phrases that are relevant to your brand can reach to new people who may be willing to explore your products or services.

It increases the chances for engagement with your target audience by allowing them to express themselves and speak their mind.

Marketers who can gather Insights from analytics from online communities are able to create more focused and relevant content.

Social listening will not directly generate sales but it can provide the right exposure for your brand to potential customers.

# Customer Behavior – The knowledge about customer demographics is crucial. The conversation’s context is a key factor when developing a content marketing strategy.

Brands with close attention to the customers can easily understand the key problems, motivations, and issues related to the products/services. Addressing customer issues isn’t as simple as having a contact form on your website.

If someone complains about your brand on Twitter then their followers see it and your response is going to impact those followers too.

# Online Conversations – Social listening is no longer a nice to have it. It’s a function of governance that should be formally written into your social media strategy.

One of the greatest dangers to your brand is to be unaware of what people are saying about you. The right social listening tool can track trends and get a broader perspective on what is happening on social media.

Be in rhythm with trends in the best way to keep your content fresh, engaging, and relevant to your customers. The observation of social trends is one thing and fluctuation is another which is responsible for any changes over there.

It can serve as a foundation for your content strategy when you will know about what factors are influencing to conversations happening in your industry.

You need to be aware of the ring near your brand whether positive or negative and respond accordingly.

# Online Reputation Management (ORM) – Businesses who fail to respond to social media mentions get a bad reputation.

The online reputation of your brand is very crucial for your social strategy and it’ll affect what people think about your products or services.

In social listening, the brands have the ability to get reputation management scenarios in real-time.

A positive brand reputation gains from genuine online presence, healthy interaction with customers and a real interest in offering useful information.

Social listening helps marketers effectively manage the brands by allowing to jump in online conversations.

It can lead to favorable results by engaging with customers and showing a willingness to change their opinion about your brand as well as create value and trust factor.

# Customer Service – Today’s customers react fast on what they discover. Customers don’t shy away from sharing their opinion about brands and advertising.

Social listening technology is to get better your brand’s customer service. Social media is the first place to share their opinions.

It’s an ideal space to evaluate how customers are reacting to your brand and campaigns. Social listening tools have the ability to provide better customer service.

It allows marketers to monitor what customers are saying in real-time and respond in the right voice at the right time. Today’s customers can discover, share, and respond to content virtually anytime, anywhere.

Marketers must use social listening to stay relevant and maintain a competitive edge. Businesses use social listening to promote a sense of community between their brand and customers.

Social listening helps to stay on top of the issues and comments around your brand and contribute to more positive sentiment around product or services.

# Identify Influencers – You’ll come across regular notice who say complimentary things about your products. It’ll be very useful when these people with high social followings who are regularly engaged with their followers.

Social listening offers the opportunity to better identify your brand champion and long-term influencers. This social media strategy will focus on rewarding brand champions with previews of your product or services.

You can invite the influencers to share their feedback on marketing campaigns and encourages endorsement of your brand.

These people actively endorsing your brand on social channels enable you to build on the relationships and control the reach.

These people speak positively about your brand, champion your products and defend your brand during a crisis.

Influencers are very helpful and can help your brand message. You can give them content to push-out and leverage their influence by A/B testing content.

# Customer Feedback – Social listening can be very useful to brands because it gives them valuable feedback.

You should respond to both positive and negative customers’ feedback. It’s easier to process positive feedback and pay equal attention to negative comments.

Listening to what customers are saying about your brand can give an idea of how you should respond.

Businesses who undertake social listening to get feedback will help them improve their products and provide better customer service.

It’s important to know what’s working and what isn’t and who are using your products or services can provide useful information.

You can use this information to improve your offerings, fix bugs, and collect positive testimonials to use in marketing efforts. Negative feedback signals what you need to do better. Ignoring negative feedback risks losing customers.

# Competitive Analysis – Social listening is to keep track of the conversations around your competitors’ products or services. It’ll be useful to monitor the conversations between your competitors and their customers on social media.

It’s helpful to observe competitors’ negative sentiment and it can take their customers closer to your brand where you can offer them something better.

It might be a good idea to explore the well-doing strategy behind the competitor’s success at social media and to implement the same elements.

You might even learn about competitor’s new products before you have had a chance to examine them yourself.

You can combine this knowledge with what you learn about preferred features from potential customers that will favor you over competitors.

Common Social Listening Technology Tools –

The social listening tools are to use the data created on social media platforms to provide brands with data-rich insights.

Social listening tools can be as watchdogs for brands. These tools automatically search and report on social media.

Business doesn’t have to assign employees to manually search to analyze social media posts for similar information.

This information is valuable and businesses can understand what kind of social media content is chosen by customers helps to build better strategies.

Social listening tools automatically apply algorithms to process the data. Some of the tools rely on the human analyst to process the data.

# Hootsuite – It’s a powerful social media scheduling platform which gives you the ability to perform large-scale social listening. This tool focus is the scheduling and distribution of content in 35 social networks.

Hootsuite’s Insights organizes all of your social listening data into an easy-to-use dashboard that tracks sentiment, demographics and more.

You can measure the performance of all social media channels. The free version of Hootsuite allows you to monitor limited social network streams.

The premiums plans give you access to listen to conversations happening beyond social media on blogs, forums, and new websites.

# Google Alerts – It’s the search engine’s way out for social listening. Google Alerts is the discovery of a content change and notification service which gather information.

It can be used for monitoring online channels to identify new content, industry trends, and conversations about your brand about your competitors.

It sends automatic email notifications once a result like an article or blog posts match the users’ search terms.

# TweetDeck – It’s a free tool and launched by Twitter. TweetDeck is a social media dashboard application for managing multiple features in one single screen.

TweetDeck allows you to create side-by-side streams of Twitter mentions, schedule tweets, monitor users, hashtags, search terms, lists, and discussions.

# Social Mention – Social Mention is a very popular free social media monitoring platform with social listening features.

It’s an online tool that tracks conversational blogs, microblogs, bookmarking websites, images, videos, and questions. It helps to measure conversations around your business and competitors.

It pulls all activity around your brand across Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and YouTube into a single dashboard. Social mention aggregates data about your brand name from 100 social media pages.

# TweetReach – It’s a statistics tool for Twitter analytics which helps users measure the reach of users and tweets.

TweetReach can be beneficial for identifying current relevant themes and influential opinion leaders for your marketing activities.

# Awario – It’s a powerful and multipurpose social media monitoring tool. It monitors all the key social networks across the web in more than 50 languages.

Awario suits both for working with individual mentions and a large amount of collecting and analyzing social media data.

This approach is essential to sustain social media strategy. You can see individual mentions from social networks and websites in your mention feed.

You can select the filter to show only certain types of mentions such as negative mentions, specific time period mentions, or any language, etc.    

How Social Listening Technology Works –

You have to define a set of keywords or topics while using social listening tools. These words can include any brand name, product name or phrases of your marketing campaigns.

It could be any influencer name, spokesperson, or describe any industry or type of product or services to get more information.

Social listening tools will start to search for posts which contain specified topics on social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Social listening tools will extract information in a report from the posts which includes name, location, date etc and content from social media platforms.

# Define Your Objective – Entering a social listening project with clearly defined objectives is important. It can be helpful to establish a solid theory when you’re building a listening query.

It’ll help to process the data into an actual takeaway and allows seeing social media as a source of actionable data Insights.

# Beyond Handle – You need to think beyond your handle on Twitter. You should monitor variations on brand and product names as well as common misspellings. When results are unrelated to your brand, utilize filters to narrow your searches.

# Monitor Keywords – You should make a list of words that generate discussion within your industry. It’s important for staying on top of trends in your industry.

There are different types of keywords that your business should pay attention to:-

>>>>> Brand Keywords – These words are specifically associated with your brand, company name, and any common variations or any misspellings.

>>>>> Industry Keywords – These words describe the types of products or services about your company.

>>>>> Location-specific Keywords – A business with a physical store or any specifically targeted locations need to track hashtags and keywords which are popular within the city, state, or country.

>>>>> Negative Keywords – These words don’t need to be in tracking. You can filter out the keywords when your brand name or industry is commonly associated with non-relevant conversation topics.

You need to add negative keywords so that you aren’t tracking conversations about those keywords.

# Eye on Competitors – You also need to make a list to see what people are saying about your competitors. What type of content your competitors publishing and how they interact with customers?

It’ll allow you to copy what your competitors are doing and improve yourself upon their mistake.

# Crisis Plan – If your website goes down then how will you deal with the social media effects. How you’ll interact with users on social networks and how you’ll get the words before you’re dealing with the issue.

Social listening is a portal of knowledge and provides a window of information during crisis management scenarios.

You can discover the audience’s insight into your brand with more data and your internal teams will be better informed in decision making.

There are a lot of potential risks when joining the social community such as malicious behavior, unpleasant users, rumors, frustrated customers, etc. It’s good to be aware of the potential threat and create a strategy in case of danger.

# Monitor Campaigns – Social media monitoring can be a lot of work in the setting upstage. There might not be much more in new business.

When you respond to a handful of tweets then you can build relationships and brand awareness.

You need to make sure that monitoring of related keywords and hashtags will capture all of the conversations about any brand promotion event.    

Conclusion – Social listening isn’t only about monitoring, but it’s more about creating and participating in real conversations about brand and products. Millions of people are daily active on social media and many can be potential customers. All they need is someone listen to their frustration, offer a concerned and helpful solution. You need to keep a close ear to everything going on social media and monitor your brand keywords and get ready to jump into conversations. Social listening creates a wide space for improving your business in many ways.